Following the motto "New Year, New Luck" I wanted to start my business this year in a more relaxed way with a good cup of coffee.

But before I could feel relaxed I got some escalation from several customers, all of them having the same problem – they tried to install the last version of BAW 18.0.0.2 but failed with an SQL exception.

I put away my half full cup of coffee to have a first look at the problem.

The installation procedure with a step-by-step instruction you can pick up from the IBM BAW support knowledgecenter

After you install the product, you must create or augment a deployment manager and one or more managed node profiles to define the runtime environment. Before starting the deployment manager, you must have configured the databases that are to be used with BAW.

The first option is the simplest and quickest method for BAW installation and configuration, as the installation procedure is doing the most steps for you.

The second option is used by customer if they need installation or configuration options that the typical installation option does not provide, e.g. if they want to do the installation silently, or if they want to install the product on an existing installation of WebSphere, or, or, ...

After you installed the product, you must create or augment a deployment manager (Dmgr) and one or more node profiles to define the runtime environment.

Before starting the Dmgr, you must have configured the databases that are to be used with BAW.

The DE properties file for creating the DE environment includes a property called ‘bpm.de.deferSchemaCreation‘.

If the properties file that is used has the parameter bpm.de.deferSchemaCreation set to FALSE, then the database tables are also created when you run the BPMConfig command.

If the bpm.de.deferSchemaCreation property in the configuration properties file is set to TRUE then only the scripts for creating the database tables are generated. In this case, the database tables need to be run manually.

Back to our customers situation - from the log it seems the user created the database sql firstly, then they initialize the database manually.

Next, they try to create the DE using the command

BPM_home\bin\BPMConfig -create -de my_environment.properties

but in the DE properties file was configured with the bpm.de.deferSchemaCreation property set to false, that means, we will initialize the database again during installation procedure.

The solution I suggested was to drop and re-create the database. Next, you initialize the database manually, but set the bpm.de.deferSchemaCreation to true in DE properties before you re-create the DE.

As you can see, this is a small difference (TRUE or FALSE) that has a considerable impact on the product installation.

In the meantime, my coffee was cold and old, time for a new one!

And if this does not help, take two of these and call me in the morning.